Working-class families are facing skyrocketing utility bills all across the country as energy monopolies like Con Edison, backed by accommodating government authorities responsible for “regulating” them, are reaping hefty profits.
Electricity prices in August surged 31% higher than four years ago. In the past year alone they rose 5.5%, while natural gas jumped by 13.8%. The utility giants are determined to get much more. The U.S. Energy Information Administration says residential electricity rates will jump some 18% in the next few years.
Nearly 60 utility companies say they will increase electricity rates this year by more than $38 billion and their efforts to garner an additional $29 billion are under review by state authorities.
Electricity prices have jumped more than twice as fast as the overall cost of living in the past year. Eighty million people say they’re having difficulty paying these bills, the U.S. Census Bureau reports.
Al Salvi in Pembroke Pines, Florida, told National Public Radio his power bill goes up to $500 a month. The 63-year-old said, “There’s a lot of seniors down here that are living check to check. Now we got to decide whether we’re going to pay the electric bill or are we going to buy medication.”
Hefty profits for energy monopolies
In contrast, ConEd, the government-authorized gas and electricity monopoly in New York City, reported an annual gross profit of $11.91 billion in 2024, up 8.24% from the previous year. Electric companies “have historically on average been allowed to earn around 10%” profit, the Wall Street Journal said.
Excited by the profit potential from supplying power to new artificial intelligence enthusiasts like the “Magnificent Seven” — Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, Apple and Tesla — utility bosses are drooling.
The demand for electricity has surged over recent years as these outfits go deeper and deeper in debt trying to corner the market in constructing the huge data centers required. Their goal is to make a bundle helping bosses cut labor and raise profits.
There are already 2,500 of these centers chewing up power across the U.S., with more being built.
These operations ate up 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy says, and this is expected to triple by 2028. Workers use of electricity in their apartments and homes will be passed by this AI explosion and other commercial use next year.
Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg is developing a “supercluster” data center in Louisiana that will use twice as much energy as the entire city of New Orleans.
President Donald Trump announced Project Stargate, where several technology giants will invest up to $500 billion — more than the budget for the Apollo space program — in artificial intelligence and data centers over the next four years.
While the AI crowd tries to pencil in energy sources years into the future, who’s paying for this increased demand? We’re being saddled with rising monthly utility bills from the energy monopolies, with approval by their government. This is how capitalism works. In New York energy bills are broken down into two parts — ConEd charges you both for “supplying” electricity and for “delivering” it. The biggest rate boosts over the past decade have been for delivery. “Several utilities have requested increases of 25% or more to their delivery rates, and this year, as much as 39%,” reports New York Focus, a statewide news agency.
But “delivery” has nothing to do with how much power you use. It’s a set fee for everyone.
In California, a power line owned by the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. failed, causing a deadly fire that destroyed the town of Paradise in November 2018. The catastrophe led to the death of 80 people, burned over 150,000 acres and destroyed 14,000 residences. The company had never cleaned out brush and other tinder under their lines there. PG&E bosses then tried to cut their losses by filing for bankruptcy.
These profit-hungry bloodsuckers are just one section of the capitalist class. What’s needed is a fight led by the unions to nationalize the energy companies under workers control, and a massive government-funded public works program to hire the workers needed to repair and rebuild the country’s aging infrastructure. This fight can be part of building a social movement of millions of working people to take political power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers.